"Can you not see?" exclaimed Felise impatiently. "Leslie Dane must be sacrificed to save us. He must be convicted by circumstantial evidence, and punished. Bonnibel is the only person who could prove his innocence. Let her keep out of the way and all will go well with us. Should she appear at the trial then discovery and ruin stare us in the face." "But you forget, my dear, that Leslie Dane can prove his own _alibi_ by the minister who married him that night, even though we could procure Bonnibel's silence." Felise laughed heartlessly. "Yes, he could, certainly, but the question is, would he? I am quite sure he would not." "But why should he be silent when his life would most probably pay the forfeit?" exclaimed Mrs. Arnold, with a slight shudder. "Mother, there are men who would die for an over-strained point of honor. From all that I can gather from his intercepted letters, Leslie Dane is precisely that sort of a man. He is a Southerner, you know--a Floridian. You have been in the South, and you know that its natives are proud, chivalrous, honorable to the highest degree! Well, he can have no means of knowing that Bonnibel is imprisoned by her husband--of course the proud old colonel will keep that fact a dead secret, and invent some plausible excuse for her retirement from society. The artist can therefore attribute her absence from the trial to but one thing." "And that?" queried Mrs. Arnold. "He will think that Bonnibel is silent because she would sooner sacrifice him than lose her prestige in society, and her brilliant position as the wife of Colonel Carlyle. He will scorn to betray her secret, and will go to his death with the self-sacrifice of a martyr." "But suppose Colonel Carlyle should let Bonnibel go free? What then?" Felise laughed softly. "He will not do so, mother. I have sent him an anonymous letter to-day that will fairly madden him with jealousy. He will never unlock her prison-door until the grass is growing over the handsome face of Leslie Dane." CHAPTER XXXIII. Within the gloomy cell of a French prison Leslie Dane was seated on a low cot-bed, looking out through the narrow, grated window at the blue and sunny sky of France. The young artist looked haggard and wan in the clear light of the pleasant day, for though it was winter the rigors of that season had not yet set in. His dark eyes had a look of suffering and despair in their beautiful depths, and his lips were set in a weary line of pain. It was the day after his incarceration, and he had spent a wretched, sleepless night, almost maddened by the horror of his fearful situation. Suddenly the heavy key turned in the iron door; it swung open to admit a visitor, and then the jailer closed and re-locked it, shutting into the gloomy cell the blonde face of Carl Muller. "_Bon jour_," he said, with his debonair smile that seemed to light the gloomy place like a beam of sunshine. "How goes it, _mon ami_?"